Jan
19
2015
Many rationalists think that if we could only get rid of religious superstitions and myths everybody would live by the lights of science and the world would be a good and happy place. How naïve. Evil people would misuse...
Jan
18
2015
That this was the world of mathematical understanding that Galileo inherited and understood is confirmed when we consider his very close connection with Renaissance music. The great musical development of the Renaissance was polyphony, so different from Medieval plainchant...
Jan
17
2015
An enchanted snow world under a charcoal black and damson sky with patches of pale ice blue edged with gold. ‘Whenever in the course of the daily hunt the red hunter comes across a scene that is strikingly beautiful...
Jan
16
2015
The historian's task is not so much to recount the past as to imagine the future. Great catastrophes happen because, until they do, people cannot imagine that they will. If people could imagine it they would take the necessary...
Jan
15
2015
A favourite cook book: Green Seasons Cookbook. A favourite vegan recipe: Slow roasted peppers and chickpeas with sage and paprika page 24.
Jan
12
2015
An ardent member of Ficino’s group was Botticelli, and his two great portrayals of Venus, The Birth of Venus and Primavera, take on a most interesting significance when they are viewed in light of Ficino’s doctrine of the emeatio,...
Jan
11
2015
It is a well meant mistake never to talk to terrorists because it gives them the oxygen of publicity. We need to talk to these people to get into their minds. We think they are evil murderers but they...
Jan
09
2015
To understand Galileo we have to appreciate that he was before all else a fervent neo-Platonic Renaissance Platonist. The Medieval doctrine of the harmonious universe reached its most sophisticated exposition in the works of Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio...
Jan
07
2015
'Our particle will simultaneously be both a nanometre away and a billion light years away in the heart of a star in a distant galaxy...Unlike a water wave, the electron wave spreads out to fill the universe in an...
Jan
06
2015
Galileo did not only overthrow Aristotle’s physics of motion, he destroyed the whole myth of the ordered cosmos, he most painfully disturbed the intellectual and the emotional securities it had sustained and threatened the very stability of societies which...